Access to real time sales and competitive information enables merchants to make informed decisions on product positioning and/or price that will optimize their businesses' performance. Today, merchants typically utilize tools that provide incomplete information on a merchant's own sales performance and little or no information on how the merchant is performing against its competition. Tools that enable merchants to analyze pricing and channel sensitivity and compare their sales results with competitors on a product, category, or seasonality basis are useful to improve profitability of the merchant. Further, given the plethora of marketing approaches, such as pay-per-click advertising, direct mail, search engine optimization, free shipping promotions, e-mail newsletters, and leveraging dominant marketplaces such as Yahoo, eBay or Amazon, merchants require tools that can objectively analyze sales data and provide actionable advice to improve the merchant's sales and profitability.
Today, online merchants use a variety of tools to track their business performance, including accounting systems (e.g., QuickBooks), web traffic reporting software (e.g., Google Analytics, WebSideStory, WebTrends, and DeepMetrix LiveStats), pay-per-click keyword performance (e.g. Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture), as well as reports from their eCommerce shopping cart software (e.g., osCommerce, VP-ASP, StoreFront.net). In addition, if a merchant uses a marketplace such as eBay, it can use the reporting tools for that marketplace.
Larger merchants can use sales analytics and customer profile services (e.g., CoreMetrics, WebSideStory HBX, WebTrends Enterprises, and Omniture). However, only CoreMetrics provides competitive analytics, but in a manner limited to comparing a merchant's results against others at a very high product category level such as General Merchandise or Apparel. If a merchant sells specialty items (e.g., pest control mole chasers) or if a merchant has a large amount of sales in multiple product categories (such as Food, Home Furnishings, Sporting Goods and also Apparel), the competitive analytics provided by this application may not provide sufficient detail for a meaningful comparison against a merchant's competitors. CoreMetrics also does not permit a merchant to compare how it performs against its peer group on a per channel (e.g., NexTag, Shop.com, Froogle), per product, or per category basis. None of the other known web analytics offerings provides competitive sales analytics. Also, most require significant setup and are too expensive for many small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). For SMBs, Google Analytics is free, easy to configure, and provides basic sales reporting functions. However, Google Analytics also lacks the ability to provide competitive analysis or overall e-commerce market research and is presently only available to merchants invited by Google to utilize this service.
Other sources of market research and competitive analysis exist, such as ComScore, Compete, eBay Marketplace Research, and Shopzilla AccuRate service, each with limitations. ComScore (and similarly, Compete) provides a consultancy offering where the company can produce a custom report of a merchant vs. its competitors based on ComScore's network of 2 million consumers that agreed to permit ComScore to track their shopping patterns. This service does not yield an interactive, configurable application that permits a merchant to “drill-down” into how the merchant competes against other vendors on a per-category or per-channel basis. ComScore's research services may be too expensive for a small merchant, and ComScore's user base, while possibly large enough to produce statistically significant results for very large e-commerce merchants, may not provide sufficient coverage of an SMB's sales patterns to produce a comprehensive comparison report with actionable recommendations for the merchant.
Shopzilla also advertises a ‘Buyer Satisfaction Service’ that allows a merchant to compare its customers' online buying experiences via “point of sale” and “fulfillment” surveys against category benchmarks. This solution is primarily focused on customer surveys, but Shopzilla does mention an “AccuRate” tool to “run trends and statistical analysis with historical data” for “competitive benchmarking, trending, filters, cross tabulations, and comment retrieval.” Shopzilla also promotes “Analyst Services” where an “assigned research analyst to manage your account. Analyst will provide ad-hoc analysis, recommendations, identify data trends, propose additional survey customization, etc.” It is unknown if Shopzilla's AccuRate product and related services are truly available, as a search on Google for “Shopzilla and AccuRate” returns no relevant results and a recent inquiry from a large e-commerce store went unanswered. It appears that Shopzilla is primarily focused on trends of customer satisfaction instead of trends of actual sales volume. However, Shopzilla's research fundamentally is limited in at least three respects:                a) Neither Shopzilla nor any other existing solution provides the merchant with a customized sales profile based on per product category sales analyses that directly enable the merchant (or the solution) to compare the merchant's results with other vendors on a per product category and per channel basis;        b) Shopzilla can only analyze that segment of a merchant's product offerings that is submitted to Shopzilla. Because Shopzilla is a comparison-shopping service requiring bidding on a pay per click basis for products to be listed on Shopzilla's site, many merchants may submit only products that are top sellers or produce high profit margins.        c) Shopzilla cannot provide merchants with information about how their products perform in markets other than Shopzilla.        
Market research reports such as those provided by eBay require the merchant to find a combination of keywords and categories to see actual sales results. If the merchant cannot guess the ‘correct’ keyword data, it may not see any results. For instance, a search done May 31, 2006 on “molechasers” for eBay's MarketPlace Research returned no results, while a search on “mole chaser” returned the data in the table below.
71 items for “mole chaser” in All Categories
Auction and Fixed Price Metrics
Avg. Sold Price $18.41
Sold Price Range $5.99-$35.10
Avg. Sold Buy It Now Price $16.79
Sold Buy It Now Price Range $7.99-$29.99
Avg. Start Price $18.67
Start Price Range $5.99-$28.30
Avg. Shipping Cost $7.74
Shipping Cost Range $5.75-$10.99
Last Sold Price $29.99
Last Sold Date and Time May-30 08:13 PDT
Completed Items 60
Sold Items 35
Avg. Bids per Item 2.95
Store Inventory Metrics
Avg. Sold Price $36.51
Sold Price Range $24.62-$128.80
Avg. Shipping Cost $14.50
Shipping Cost Range $14.50-$14.50
Last Sold Price $27.95
Last Sold Date and Time May-30 23:10 PDT
Completed Items 11
Sold Items 11
eBay Marketplace Research does little to help the merchant know what it should search on to find comparable merchants or sales. Further, there is no concept defining the peers of a given merchant, nor is there an ability to compare one merchant's performance against other merchants. Plus, on eBay, when a user does find a keyword combination to produce good search results, the raw transaction data is available by product. Many merchants would prefer not to permit their competitors to drill down into actual individual sales made by the merchant. Finally, eBay is just one sales channel and seldom the only sales channel in which a product is sold.
While existing solutions can provide some useful competitive information for a merchant, they all have significant limitations. None provides a tool permitting an SMB merchant to compare its results on a per product or per product category basis against competitive results while considering performance in multiple sales channels. This type of analysis is critical for merchants to determine market size and how well they compete at a level where specific marketing decisions can be made.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method that facilitates the efficient collection and reporting of competitive market information for Internet merchants.